The Gate Thief (Mither Mages) (23 page)

The Gate Thief had brought three people with him through the Wild Gate.

Danny pulled off the shorts and put on pants and a shirt, socks and shoes and a jacket. He would not be running this morning after all.

Once he was dressed, he stepped through the gate in his house that led to the Silvermans’ upstairs hall, then walked from house to barn through the biting cold of this autumn morning. The trees were dazzling with color. There was a trace of frost on the grass.

Inside the barn, Leslie and Marion were standing side by side, looking up at the loft where Loki stood with a woman and two young boys.

“Took you long enough,” said Marion.

“I was mostly naked,” said Danny. “I stopped to dress.”

“Thank you for that,” said Leslie.

“Danny North,” said Loki.

“I don’t want you here,” said Danny in Westilian.

“I need your help,” said Loki. “But it will be hard to converse with your friend prepared to make the ground swallow us up.”

“Only swallow,” said Marion, in his heavily accented version of Westilian. “Not chew.”

“His mercy is noted,” said Loki. “That’s why I didn’t gate him to the bottom of a convenient river. Or into a tree.”

“You didn’t harm him,” said Danny, “because you are afraid of me.”

“I didn’t harm him,” said Loki, “because I am an intruder, and he is protecting his home and his friend.”

“And you didn’t leave, because you wanted to be here when I arrived.”

“I promise not to do anything to anyone here,” said Loki. “I will not try to take back my own gates, or swallow any others’. In return I hope you will not try to take the few that remain to me.”

Danny turned to Marion and Leslie. “May I invite them into the house?”

“Guest law will apply then,” said Marion.

“I know,” said Danny.

“It will bind you as well as us,” Leslie reminded him.

“It will bind us all,” said Danny. “Aren’t you curious to know about the woman and the children?”

“Anonoei, onetime mistress of King Prayard of Iceway,” said Loki. “And the unofficial but potentially useful sons of the King, Eluik and Enopp.”

Danny nodded to them formally. It was a ritual greeting that all the children learned very young, to be used on important and solemn occasions. Only as a child, Danny’s bow had been deep, and from the waist; the nod he gave now was that of a ruler toward subordinates—the nod that Baba bestowed on those saluting him as Odin. No one could mistake what he was asserting, and indeed they did not. The return bow of the woman and her sons was deep, though not so deep as to imply worthlessness. And Loki also bowed slightly from the waist rather than merely nodding in return. The hierarchy had been asserted and agreed to.

“May we enter your home?” Danny asked the Silvermans again.

Leslie sighed. “Gate me to the kitchen, please, Danny.”

He did.

“I’d like to walk with our guests,” said Marion.

Loki understood, and instead of gating down from the loft, he descended the ladder, Anonoei and the boys after him. Then Marion drew Loki with him, and walked beside the ancient yet youthful gatemage toward the house.

Danny knew that Marion would make dire warnings about what would happen if Loki broke his word. Danny also knew that Loki would agree cheerfully, knowing that in a pinch, he could always gate away, so Marion’s threats were more symbolic than practicable.

Meanwhile, Danny looked at the woman and smiled. “You’re a mother. I had one once.”

“I hope a mother that you loved.”

“Devotedly,” said Danny. “Why don’t you and your older son walk ahead, and let me talk to the young one. Enopp, is it?”

Anonoei took Eluik by the hand and walked from the barn, whose smaller door was still standing open after Marion’s and Loki’s departure.

“These are cows, aren’t they,” said the boy Enopp.

“They are,” said Danny.

“They’re huge,” said Enopp.

“Cows may be bigger here than in the place you came from,” said Danny. “But these are particularly well-fed and healthy cows. Leslie takes good care of them. Though at this moment I believe they still want milking. Would you like to help me?”

The boy nodded. “I’m only little,” he said. “And I’m not very strong. I’ve been in prison, you know.”

“I’m sorry to hear that,” said Danny. “Did you do something very bad?”

“No, but I’m dangerous, because there are people who think my brother or I should be king after my father, and not the child of Queen Bexoi. She’s from Gray, and her brother is our enemy.”

“I’m glad you’re out of prison, since you didn’t do anything wrong.”

Enopp shrugged. “I’m glad to be out, too, but it’s dangerous for me even to exist. I don’t have to actually do anything.”

“I know the feeling,” said Danny. “I was older than you, though, when people made the same judgment about me.”

“Did they put you in jail?”

“I’m a gatemage,” said Danny. “They couldn’t if they tried. All they can do is kill me or leave me alone.”

“Or kill someone you love,” said Enopp.

“Ah,” said Danny. “I see you understand how power works.”

“I’m son of a king,” said Enopp. “I think I’m going to be a gatemage, too.”

Meanwhile, Danny had attached the milker to a cow. “Do you see how I did that?”

“Does it hurt the cow?”

“It’s designed to fit her teat exactly right,” said Danny. “She likes it.”

“What does it do?”

Danny spent the next fifteen minutes explaining the milking machines and letting Enopp help in whatever way he was large enough and strong enough.

“What do you think of Loki?” asked Danny.

“Who?” asked Enopp.

“The gatemage who brought you.”

“Wad,” said Enopp.

The word made no sense to Danny in this context. “You want bread?”

“His name,” said Enopp. “That’s what Mother calls him.”

“Wad,” said Danny. “Not a noble name.”

“He used to be the castle spy. He would climb everywhere, watch everything. Hull named him. The chief baker. She’s dead, somebody murdered her because she refused to murder the Queen. It would have been better if she had done it. The Queen is an evil bitch.”

Danny was amused at the way Enopp echoed what he must have heard. “What about Wad? Is he evil or good?”

“He kept us in prison,” said Enopp. “But when Queen Bexoi said to kill us, he didn’t. After a while he gave us better food. And he got us out just when soldiers were trying to kill us in our caves.”

“That sounds frightening.”

“It was,” said Enopp. “They were my father’s soldiers.”

“Did they know who you were?”

Enopp thought a moment. “I don’t know,” he said. “But they knew I was little.”

“You have a point,” said Danny. “Enopp, why did your mother and Wad bring you here?”

Enopp shrugged. “It isn’t safe for us in Iceway. I think they want us to be safe here.”

“This world isn’t safer. People die on both worlds, just as easily.”

“When I’m a gatemage, I’ll hide where they can’t find me.”

“Are you sure that’s what you’ll be?”

“I’m already good with languages,” said Enopp. “That’s a sign.”

“It is,” said Danny. “Are you also a devilish little brat?”

Enopp gave that more thought than Danny had expected. “I don’t know. I have only been free of my prison for a few weeks.”

“We’d better watch carefully then,” said Danny, “so we don’t get taken by surprise when the pranks start.”

They kept milking till the job was done. Only then did Danny take Enopp by the hand and walk with him across the yard to the house.

In the kitchen, Leslie had the table spread with small plates and a big platter of warmed-up sliced bread and an array of butter, jams, and honey. Everyone was eating. Enopp ran right to the table beside his brother and started jabbering to him. Danny saw that Eluik did not answer him, or even show a sign of listening. But Enopp was undiscouraged by this; and it wasn’t as if Eluik were inert, for he was eating steadily, though without any visible pleasure in the food, which Danny knew from experience was extraordinarily good.

“Did my son bore you?” asked Anonoei. “He chatters as if he thought himself a great philosopher or statesman, with the world eager to hear his words.”

“I could not have been more eager,” said Danny, adopting the arch-formal tones he had only overheard when spying on the adults meeting in the library of the old house in the North Family compound. “Your son is surprisingly happy for one so recently a prisoner.”

“He is resilient,” said Anonoei.

Danny could not help glancing at Eluik, but then looked at Loki, as if he had only chanced to look at Eluik as his gaze passed from Anonoei to the Gate Thief.

“You have achieved your first purpose,” Danny said to Loki. “You have passed through a Great Gate.”

“My first purpose was to see that no such gate existed,” said Loki. “But having failed in that, it is true that I thought it wise to refresh such small powers as are left to me.”

“You know more than I about how these powers work,” said Danny, “but it seems to me that while our brute force depends on the number of our gates, our dexterity depends on knowledge and experience. I have the brute force, it’s true, but you have the deftness of long practice.”

“Long practice followed by far longer disuse,” said Loki. “I have spent fourteen centuries and more drifting upward through a tree, aware of little but occasional flashes of gatemaking, which I quickly extinguished.”

“Yet you did come out of the tree,” said Danny, “and apparently some time before I attempted a Great Gate.”

“But not before you made your first few dozen gates,” said Loki. “Your first few hundred, I should say.”

It was the Gate Thief’s admission that he had been aware of Danny for some time. That he had sensed, however dimly, that Danny was alive, a great mage in potential if not in accomplishment.

“I didn’t even know I was making the gates,” Danny admitted.

“Be careful what you say,” said Marion.

“He knows,” said Danny. “He has been watching me even before he knew that it was I whom he watched.”

“Aren’t we the lofty speakers now,” said Leslie. “I feel as if I’m in a school, studying Westilian style.”

“These gatemages and their linguistic show-offery,” said Marion in English.

“I am learning your English a little,” said Loki, and while his words were slow and stilted, his Ohio accent was nearly perfect.

“How?” demanded Leslie in English. “Who in Westil could possibly teach you? Do you have spies here?”

“He does,” said Danny, also in English.

Leslie stood up and paced to the kitchen counter, then turned around, as if somehow the sink had been besieged, and she were its sole defender.

“Me,” said Danny. “His spies are inside me—the gates I took from him. Thousands of them, and through them he can glimpse a little. He can hear.”

“How much?” demanded Marion. “What does he know?”

“I don’t know,” said Danny. “All his gates ever do that I know of is demand that any working gate be eaten up. If he had succeeded in swallowing my gates, then I could tell you just how much a mage can learn through his captive gates. But I’d rather have my ignorance than his knowledge.”

“If I could hear more, I’d speak better,” said Loki, reverting to Westilian. “In truth, I see nothing. I hear nothing. I am inside the womb of his mind. But there is where his language dwells, and his memory. I cannot search at will; but I can overhear his thoughts, when he makes them into language. I can see his memories, when he concentrates on them. I am
not
spying. Where he has imprisoned my outself, I have no choice but to see and hear what he shows me.”

But Danny didn’t believe Loki. The trouble was he didn’t know in which direction the lie was leaning: Did Loki see and hear far more than he admitted? Or had he seen and heard nothing at all until he passed through the Wild Gate, enhancing his powers and coming so much nearer to Danny himself?

“What did you come here for?” asked Danny. “You came with these three, so your purpose was more than your own enhancement.”

“Their lives are in danger,” said Loki. “Here they will be safe.”

“That’s absurdly false,” said Marion. “All the mages of the world would be assaulting us, if they knew this Wild Gate existed in our barn. There’s no more dangerous place on Earth.”

“But who would tell them?” asked Loki. Then he raised a hand. “That was not a threat.”

Marion did not relax, his posture even more alert. “How else can we hear that statement?”

“An observation,” said Loki. “This Wild Gate has existed for days now, and yet they leave you alone. If your secret were out, they would not wait.”

“They’re afraid of our power of defense,” said Leslie. “Marion and I have passed through a gate. No beastmage can hold on to his heartbound, if they come against us. The ground surrounding us is under Marion’s control. Danny could gate them away, even if they got past our defense.”

“So you think they do know, and bide their time?” asked Loki.

“What do you want,” demanded Marion. “I don’t believe you brought this woman here for her protection. I feel a great power in her.”

“I felt it first,” said Leslie. “She’s a mage in her own right, and passing through the Great Gate made her dangerous.”

“It did,” said Anonoei. “But the very fact that you mistrust me shows that I have used none of my power on you.”

It took only a moment for the implications of her remark to sink in. Marion rose to his feet and joined Leslie by the sink. “Danny, she’s a manmage,” Marion said in English.

“I got it,” said Danny. “But as she said, she hasn’t used it.”

“Or she’s so powerful that we can’t
feel
that she used it on us.”

“So you think she’s making you so suspicious of her?” asked Danny.

“If she tried to use it I would gate her away myself,” said Loki. “
I
gain nothing if she irritates you, and neither does she. We face a deadly enemy on Westil, a Firemaster at least, if not a Lightrider.”

“Queen Bexoi,” added Enopp helpfully. “Our father’s true wife.”

Danny looked from Loki to Anonoei, and saw that Bexoi was, indeed, Anonoei’s objective here. The grim determination in her face, the hand that rested on Enopp’s nape, the little toss of her head, all these testified to Enopp’s having said the truth.